Category: Specs

Tech specs

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Specs

Can’t we all just get along?

Sam Ruby came out with a posting that covers a conversation about characters and RSS 2.0 and Rogers Caldenhead, but ends up with a simple statement about syndication feeds:

The key takeaway here is to beware of anybody who preaches one true format or one size fits all. Each format has its strengths. And none of them are going away any time soon.

Meanwhile, you can help by spreading the word. The word is detente. RSS 1.0 has a reason to exist. RSS 2.0 has a reason to exist. And Atom has a reason to exist.

And if anybody tells you differently, and won’t listen when you suggest detente, take Brent’s suggestion and make use of the handy Unsubscribe button. That’s what it is there for.

I recently pulled my RSS 2.0 syndication feed, though it wasn’t quite for political reasons though the reason is personal, and I’m still not providing an RSS 2.0 feed. But I agree with Sam: there’s plenty of room for all syndication formats around here.

In support of syndication détente, I’m dedicating the following photo to Sam. It’s titled, Plenty of room for everyone.

(My God! I just wrote something about technology that may actually manage not to piss someone off! I must be losing my touch. )

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People Specs Technology

Dropping support for RSS 2.0

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

For those of you who subscribe to my feeds, note that I’m dropping the RSS 2.0 feed starting next week.

Why? Because hosting an RSS 2.0 feed is providing indirect support for behavior that sucks the joy out of my day. Because Dave Winer is a hypocrite, and the so-called RSS 2.0 ‘advisory board’ is a mockery on true open standards efforts. More importantly, though, when I woke this morning, I said to myself:

Today is a good day to stop supporting assholes.

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Specs

Entering our manyth year of syndication discontent

Ben Hammersley has a new article at the Guardian on the syndication format wars, as they enter their too manyth year anniversary.

As he sees it, don’t hold your breath for a united RSS/Atom syndication effort. However, unless you’re specifically coding an application that generates syndication feeds, or consumes them, most people could care less which syndication format is used:

And so, as it stands, the content syndication world has two competing specification “brands”: RSS in its many flavours, and Atom. The Atom project has been very successful, with the two biggest weblogging firms, Blogger (run by Google) and Six Apart (the people behind Movable Type and Typepad) adopting the standard. This produced more than half a million users alone.

This switching effect, where one or two developers can move thousands of users between different specifications, highlights a valid point: for the end users, the argument is close to meaningless. As long as their RSS reader software can read Atom as well, they will never notice the difference – and most of the contemporary RSS readers have been, or are being, upgraded by their authors to support both specifications.

The only quibble I have is that Ben has lumped RSS 1.0 into the ‘RSS’ specifications, and the two really are separate specs, with a shared name. Other than that, I agree with Ben – the end user could care less. The only requests I’ve had in regards to my feeds is the type of material included, such as full content compared to excerpts; and providing more information about the source, such as my name in addition to the weblog’s name.

There! I’ve had my RSS and Atom syndication post for the year. Now that I have that out of the way, I can move on to other things.

Categories
Semantics Specs

RDF Specifications Recommended

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to Proposed Recommendation.

Relieved more like it as these long awaited specifications finally reach the “proposed recommended” state, one short step before becoming formal recommendations.

These documents (RDF/XML Syntax Specification, RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0, RDF Semantics, RDF Primer, RDF Test Cases, and RDF: Concepts and Abstract Syntax) represent a great deal of time and effort on the part of the RDF working group members, who are to be congratulated in finishing this important milestone.

In addition to the RDF documents, the OWL Web Ontology Language also made proposed recommendation status. Someone at the W3C must have said: let’s get this show on the road, children.

Semantic Web, or should I say, semantic web, here we come.

(Thanks to Dave Beckett and Danny Ayers for heads up.)

Categories
RDF Specs

Necho update

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m off to walk around favorite places today, but first an update on what was Echo and now looks to become Necho by default.

I tried to catch up on the wiki, but a couple of days on the road has put me hopelessly out of touch on this project. However, there seems to be a move towards a new name, a syndication format, and an API. I don’t like the new name – Necho for Not Echo. I’m indifferent to the syndication format, and there seems to be a couple of variations on the API. Still digging through this info.

Danny praises me for creating an RDFOWL vocabulary of N/Echo. I wish I could take credit for this, Danny, but someone else wrote these vocabularies – or demonstrated using existing vocabularies for the second example.

My biggest concern with this effort is not that the name will stay at Necho, or that the syndication feed and API won’t work. My biggest concern is that there is a small core of controlled data forming the current effort, while a lot of other people are slamming stuff together for ‘extensions’.

The first draft of the data model for N/Echo was a great version 1.0, but we should be looking at version 2.0, which accounts for things like categories and threads – the information that is the semantically rich aspect of a weblog entry. After all, there is little to be learned about recording that this entry was published on this date by this person. Where’s the category, or topology associated with the entry? How do we record that my previous entry was about traveling, San Francisco, photographs, the fact that dogs are no longer allowed on dog beach? How do we record that this item links to a post by Danny, and references a wiki, and that I’m sending a trackback ping?

We can record the N/Echo data in RDF/XML, but it’s really not going to extend the semantic richness of what is fairly simple data: entry by person on this date and with this link and of this type.

We can forgo all that boring data model stuff and just go to the extensions to the XML – but for what? The syndication feed? The API? And do we all agree on what we mean by category?

The core effort will be a success, of that I have no doubt. And that’s a good start. However, this core effort is surrounded by chaos, and that troubles me.

Regardless, good job to the people who work so hard, and seemingly do not sleep. Or eat. Or make love to their significant others, and play with the kiddies and poochies. And I know you all love me, which means you must not hate me, even if my interests do diverge at this point from the majority of the people forming the XML and creating them RESTful APIs.